Quakers, Jews, and Science

Quakers, Jews, and Science
Author: G. N. Cantor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2005-09-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199276684

"This study examines how two minorities - the Quaker and Anglo-Jewish communities - engaged with the sciences. With their roots in the mid-seventeenth century, both communities maintained their religious and social norms throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while standing outside the hegemony of the Anglican Church and being subject to various forms of discrimination. Yet for both Quakers and Jews science offered educational and career opportunities and participation in the wider society. They adopted their own scientific interests, with Quakers being attracted principally to the observational sciences. Drawing on a wealth of documentary material, much of which has not been analysed by previous historians, Geoffrey Cantor charts the involvement of Quakers and Jews in many different aspects of science: scientific research, science education, science-related careers, and scientific institutions ranging from the Royal Society to the Great Exhibition."--BOOK JACKET.

Jews, Quakers and the Holocaust

Jews, Quakers and the Holocaust
Author: Ira Zornberg
Publisher: IRA Zornberg
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-09-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9780692761427

By spring of 1939, after the Night of the Broken Glass (more commonly referred to as Kristallnacht), German Jews were desperate to escape what they had considered their Fatherland. Unable to find nations willing to accept them, many parents begged for the assistance of those who would help in transporting their children to safety. Other children who could have been saved were those of fathers in concentration camps or those who parents had taken their own lives. Because of the special role in feeding German children at the end of World War I, Quakers commanded a level of respect and trust which allowed them to assume the leadership in an effort to save Jewish children. At least a third of those identified, in Nazi Germany, as Jewish children by race (having on Jewish grandparent) may have been of mixed religious backgrounds. In Europe, Quaker groups assumed leadership in what came to be called the Kindertransport. They removed and provided homes for nearly 10,000 children. On the day after Kristallnacht, a Quaker fact-finding mission from the U.S. flew to Germany. An effort to replicate the Kindertransport in the U.S. depended upon the passage of the Wagner-Rogers Bill. That Bill, introduced in Congress in February 1939, provided for the admission of 20,000 "unaccompanied children" (outside of the quota of 27,000 per year from Germany) under the age of fourteen, over a two-year period, and at no cost to the United States. The struggle to enact the Wagner-Rogers Bill introduces us to people in the United States who assumed leadership roles in that effort. It identifies virulent opponents, and allows us to speculate as to what best explains the failure of the Bill to become law.

Quakers and Nazis

Quakers and Nazis
Author: Hans A. Schmitt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN:

Why the title Quakers and Nazis, not Quakers against Nazis? Was not hostility part of the interaction between the two groups? On the contrary, Hans A. Schmitt's compelling story describes American, British, and German Quakers' attempts to mitigate the suffering among not only victims of Nazism but Nazi sympathizers in Austria and Lithuania as well. With numerous poignant illustrations of the pressure and social cost involved in being a Quaker from 1933 to 1945, Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness reveals a facet of Nazi Germany that is entirely unknown to most people. The book focuses on the heroic acts foreign and German Quakers performed under the Nazi regime, offering fully documented and original information regarding the Quakers' commitment to nonviolence and the relief of the victims. Schmitt's narrative reveals the stress and tension of the situation. How should a Quaker behave in a meeting for worship with a policeman present? Spies did not stop Friends in worship services from openly criticizing Hitler and Göring, but Nazis did inflict torment on Friends. Yet Friends did not, could not, respond in like manner. Olga Halle was one Friend who worked to get people, mostly Jews, out of Germany until America entered the war. When emigration was outlawed, twenty-eight were stranded. Years later her distress was still so deep that even on her deathbed she recited their names. Schmitt reminds us that virtually all the Berlin Quakers secreted Jews throughout the war. He shows how these brave Quakers opposed the Nazis even after they lost their jobs and had been harassed by the Gestapo. Risking their lives, the Friends persisted in their efforts to alleviate suffering. At a time when the scholarly world is divided as to whether all Germans knew and approved of the Final Solution, this book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion. Quakers--despite their small numbers--played, and continue to play, an important role in twentieth-century humanitarian relief. Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness, a study of how Friends performed under the extreme pressure of a totalitarian regime, will add significantly to our general understanding of Quaker and German history.

Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century

Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century
Author: Johannes van den Berg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9400927568

This volume contains a number of studies on Jewish-Christian re lations, in which special attention is given to the Netherlands and England, and the texts of some recently discovered and other rare documents in the same field. The work originates in a symposium on this subject held on 23 January 1985 at the University of Leiden under the auspices of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute for the study of Anglo-Dutch relations. Various authors have contributed to this volume. Each author is responsible for his own contribu tion; thus, in cases of discrepancies in interpretation, orthography or method of transcription we have made no attempt at harmoni zation. We thank all those who have made publication possible. The Stichting Dr Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds gave a gener ous grant in defrayal of the cost of printing, and the Ir. F.E.D. Enschede-Stichting kindly covered the additional expenses re sulting from the translation and editing of some of the contribu tions. Last but not least we should like to thank Prof. R.H. Pop kin for his stimulating interest in the publication of this volume.

Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Author: Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789774161056

Early efforts by peacemakers in the worlds longest refugee crisis

Quaker Quicks: Open to New Light: Quakers and Other Faiths

Quaker Quicks: Open to New Light: Quakers and Other Faiths
Author: Eleanor Nesbitt
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 95
Release: 2023-11-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1803413247

Open to New Light is not only for readers interested in exploring Quaker history and principles but also for anyone interested in different faiths and the relationships between them. The topics covered include Quakers' historic interfaith encounters, as well as more recent engagements with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, Sikhs, Baha'is, followers of Indigenous religions and Humanists.

Hitler’s Jewish Refugees

Hitler’s Jewish Refugees
Author: Marion Kaplan
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300249500

An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment
Author: Madeleine Pennington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-03-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0192648411

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organised and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological changes guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, Madeleine Pennington explores the Quakers' positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Considering the Quakers' engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, Pennington unveils the Quakers' concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the 'inward Christ', or 'the Light within'. In doing so, she further challenges stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been under-estimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment.

The Jewish Heritage in British History

The Jewish Heritage in British History
Author: Tony Kushner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136293361

'In the contemporary British context, ‘heritage’ is a highly politicized and contentious term', Tony Kusher writes in his introduction to this edited collection of essays on the subject of Jewish heritage, thus setting the tone for a book as much interested in the preservation as it is the understanding of this culture. This book provides a more theoretical framework for the pursuit of Jewish historiography and heritage preservation in Britain. The essays collected here look both to the past and to the future, discussing the nature of the Jewish heritage that has already been produced and looking toward possibilities of future development. Kushner has collected a wide range of subjects from social history to architecture to the question of Jewish women. This book will be of interest to students of social history and ethnic studies, particularly Jewish history in London and Manchester. It will be also of some use to those interested in architecture.

Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America

Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America
Author: Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2012-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786464623

Americans have learned in elementary school that their country was founded by a group of brave, white, largely British Christians. Modern reinterpretations recognize the contributions of African and indigenous Americans, but the basic premise has persisted. This groundbreaking study fundamentally challenges the traditional national storyline by postulating that many of the initial colonists were actually of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish ancestry. Supporting references include historical writings, ship manifests, wills, land grants, DNA test results, genealogies, and settler lists that provide for the first time the Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Jewish origins of more than 5,000 surnames, the majority widely assumed to be British. By documenting the widespread presence of Jews and Muslims in prominent economic, political, financial and social positions in all of the original colonies, this innovative work offers a fresh perspective on the early American experience.